| By :
Kristin Gabriel
The latest social networking sites are designed for human interaction enabling users to meet other people; keep in touch with them; and share their experiences, opinions and feelings. Most social sites are all built on a similar foundation—each user builds a network of contacts. Bound by trust, users then create content for friends to share. The potential for malicious activities arises when one or more of those contacts breach your trust, and then many other users become victims. The Internet security experts are saying today's online communities are top of mind to hackers and criminals who use a variety of techniques to launch identity theft, and social networking scams. In fact, participation now exceeds 70 million in social networks and without taking precautions, no one is safe from attack. There is malicious software targeting social sites and their growing memberships. What can go wrong on a social media site? Your account may be compromised and used by a crook; you may have added somebody you thought was trustworthy but he/she turns out not to be; or insufficient use of privacy controls may have caused you to share data with people you don't know. A wealth of personal information, social media sites often encourage people to share their pictures, date of birth, family ties, home address, and address. This just gives attackers ideas and information required to perform attacks such as credit card fraud or identity theft. Researchers say the price of personal information ranges from $50 per stolen bank account credentials to about $8 per million email addresses. Fresh email addresses obtained from a social networking site pay more. False identity is growing in social networks because it is easy and free to set up a profile allowing criminals to pass themselves off as someone else and establish phony friendships that lead to float in invitations to adult content sites. There are many underground forums selling personal information. Your data can be mined and stored until a criminal pays the right price for it, and then this information is used to obtain birth certificates, passports or other documentation required to fake an identity in the real world. Email addresses that come from social networks can also be entered into databases that are later used for spam campaigns. These can then be further categorized to improve the impact of the campaign—race, age, country and other factors can be used as filters in such a database so that its market price is higher than just any normal database of email addresses. A targeted campaign known as spear phishing uses emails as sender addresses because using a known contact from a social media networking site's friends list adds credibility to the malicious email. This in turn increases the chances of success for the criminal to attack your friends in the list. Here are some ways to minimize risks in social networks:
1.Publish only information that you are comfortable with.
2.Add only those people you trust to your contact list.
3.Try not to click unexpected links coming from people you do not know.
4.Do not ever fully trust anyone you do not know that well.
5.Make sure you install an Internet security product especially for netbooks for surfing the Web safely. There are many security companies with new technology and products for Internet security that offer strong, fast and easy-to-use protection. The latest technology uses cloud technology to automatically stop viruses and spyware before they reach your computer - it's a whole new way to protect your computer.
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